Guo, Y. 1 , Martin, R. 1 , Hamilton, A. C. 1 , Van Dyke, J. A. 2 & Tan, Y. 1
1 Department of Psychology, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA
2 Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT, USA
Interference in sentence comprehension has been observed when a noun phrase that intervenes between a long distance subject-verb dependency has semantic or syntactic features that make it an appropriate subject of the verb (e.g., “customer” causes both semantic and syntactic interference in “The hostess who the customer ignored was talking loudly” because “customer” is a subject noun that is semantically plausible as the agent of talking). In a 2 (low vs. high semantic interference) × 2 (low vs. high syntactic interference) fMRI study, activation was measured during sentence and comprehension question processing to determine the brain regions involved in resolving semantic and syntactic interference (p corrected by cluster threshold < 0.01). One region in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG; BA45) showed greater activation for the high than the low syntactic interference conditions following the onset of sentences. Interestingly, a largely overlapping region in the LIFG (BA45) also showed greater activation for the high than the low semantic interference conditions, but following the onset of comprehension questions. The results suggest that a region in the LIFG is involved in the resolution of both semantic and syntactic interference during sentence comprehension, but at different time points in processing.